DRACULA: Children

In Dracula, children do not play a major role. The few glimpses we do have of them are rare and revealing about what is happening in the story.

The "Bloofer Lady", who is actually Lucy as a vampire, attracts children away from their play in order to take their blood. The children do not seem to realize their danger for in the newspaper it accounted one of her victims as, "this poor little mite, when he woke up today, asked the nurse if he might go away... to play with the "bloofer lady." (Pg. 174). The symbolism of this child's opinion of the "Bloofer Lady" reflects the opinion of most of the heroes of the story at the time. The men who had loved Lucy were still so and, since they were ignorant or in doubt of her condition, would have ran away with her. Arthur's response to her seduction supports this theory: as she pleaded for him to rest with her he "seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms" (Pg. 188). His suceptibility to her spell was probably more potent because he had been her fiance and was childlike in his refusal to believe she was dead.

While the group of men confronted the vampire Lucy, she held in her posession a child which she would have fed on. When she became preoccupied with the men, "she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone" (Pg. 188). The child's situation mirrors that of Arthur as she seduces him. He is has helpless to her as a child is to a vampire with the strength of twenty men.

In a less significant situaiton, Jonathan is trying to get ahold of information regarding the boxes of earth. To get an address sent to him, "one of the children went off with a penny to buy an envelope and a sheet of paper, and to keep the change" (Pg. 230). This situation reflects Jonathan's usefullness at the moment. He is thrilled to be useful to the vampire hunt cause and the information he is getting is most important to him as the penny would have been to the child.